What is Fair?

After getting caught up on a day or two of the paper, I read a letter to the editor in the LA Times. To summarize, a woman wrote in juxtaposing an article on reductions in Medi-Cal fees and an ad for summer rentals in Malibu going for $150k/month (btw--that is NOT a typo). She concludes with the question, "Where is the leadership toward a fairer system?"

We'll ignore the fact that there is zero relationship between someone who can afford to rent a house for 150 large and how CA funds Medi-Cal. For the record, lots of consumer product companies rent houses in Malibu for parties during the summer so that the young, rich and famous will be photographed with their stuff. It's just as likely as the person renting the house is trying to attract this kind of money as opposed to an individual shelling it out.

Regardless, I wonder how this woman defines 'fair'? Given how she poses the question, 'fair' seems to mean that there's a limit as to how much material wealth a person can have as long as there are people who don't have enough. I'm thinking that's the definition of equal.

To me, fair is when you get what you earned and that people who bring the same things to the table walk away from the table with more or less the same. I'm not a dope. We don't live in a perfectly fair country. And while there might be other systems that make people more (materially) equal, I don't think that they are any more fair.

I think of these things when I listen to politicians talk about how they are going to fix this or that. I listen to whether their answer is to put up barriers to those who are getting what they earned or removing the barriers that make the system unfair. I much prefer the latter.